ART

ART; A Bounty of Egyptian Imagery

By VIVIEN RAYNOR

Published: February 25, 1990

WHERE revivals were concerned, the Classical and Gothic styles had no competition until late in the 18th century, when there developed an interest in Egypt. Ancient though the civilization was, few Europeans knew more of it than what could be gleaned from the classical writers and the Bible. But this was the Romantic era and its figurehead, Napoleon, put Egypt back on the map by invading it and beating the Turks at the Battle of the Pyramids, in 1798.

So began the Egyptian Revival and now, at the end of another century, the effect it had on art and artifacts for decades to come is the subject of two shows. One is ''Egypt: The Source and the Legacy,'' at Sarah Lawrence College Art Gallery; the other is ''The Sphinx and The Lotus: The Egyptian Movement in American Decorative Arts, 1865 to 1935.''

Introducing the Sarah Lawrence show in Bronxville, its curator, Stephen Lamia, who is also director of the gallery, sets the scene by locating the first signs of Egyptaica in Piranesi's designs for the interiors of the Roman Caffe Degli Inglese, one of which is in the show. Then, having established Napoleon's campaign as the catalyst, Mr. Lamia goes on to list the key events that kept the movement going. These were: the exploration of the Nile Valley, Jean-Francois Champillon deciphering the Rosetta Stone and, in 1865, the opening of the Suez Canal to, as it were, the accompaniment of Verdi's ''Aida.''

Archeologists, artists, photographers and writers (Flaubert among them) streamed into Egypt throughout the 19th century, but the climax of publicity came in 1922, when Howard Carter opened the tomb of Tutankhamen. The curator does a thorough job investigating the significance of Egyptian imagery and assessing its influence on Western artists and designers. Ed Polk Douglas, a historical consultant, contributes a short essay on Egyptian motifs in the decorative arts.

A stately exhibition that is generally sandy in tone, sandy in hue, it includes a few antiquities to provide a context for the movement. Notable among these are: a limestone stele dated 2565 to 2420 B.C. that is filled with hieroglyphs; a high relief of a queen or diety from the first century B.C.; and a seventh-century B.C. profile of a nobleman, a limestone relief with deeply incised contours. So much for the Egyptians; now for their followers.

An artist whose preoccupation with the Sphinx was lifelong, Elihu Vedder is represented by an 1890 study of it that is tame compared with some of his earlier efforts or, for that matter, with the version by the French painter, Luc-Olivier Merson. In this 1879 canvas, the statue is scarcely the size of a grizzly bear, but the Virgin Mary and the Infant Jesus, spotlighted, sleep peacefully between its paws.

Nearly invisible in the surrounding darkness, Joseph lies wrapped in a cloak beside a guttering fire, the donkey in attendance. John Singer Sargent takes the secular view, depicting the statue as an earth-colored silhouette flanked by pyramids under a pale sky. A decade later, in 1901, the German-American painter, Carl Brandt, pays his homage with a sunny panorama of the whole site, complete with tiny tourists in the foreground.

For John ''Mad'' Martin, an English painter working in the early 1800's, the Egyptian Revival was another opportunity to exercise his apocalyptic vision. His ''Destroying Angel'' and ''Death of the Firstborn'' are spectacular as mezzotints and as melodramas. Incidentally, Turner can scarcely be told apart from Martin in his mezzotint-engraving ''The Fifth Plague of Egypt'' (1808), in which dark clouds are pierced by shafts of light and a thunderbolt and the scale, if not the size, is immense.

An American naive whose life almost coincided with the 19th century, Erastus Salisbury Field was capable of huge canvases. But to judge from ''He Turned Their Waters Into Blood,'' he had no talent for scenes of disaster.

Needless to say, Josiah Wedgwood and Sons were quick to exploit the new fashion, although according to the green and white canopic jar with a Pharaoh-shaped lid, they did no more than substitute Egyptian for Neo-Classical motifs. Made in this country as well as Europe, the objects run from silverware and china to mirrors and chairs; from an obelisk table thermometer to a Tiffany clock made of marble, basalt and gilt bronze and flanked by obelisks in the same materials; and the majority are of good quality.

The nonspecialists, however, will find it easier to detect the spirit of the movement - such as it was - in the two-dimensional work, especially the documentary photographs and watercolors. Good examples of the first are W. Hammerschmidt's study of the pyramids at Giza and Frank Mason Good's ''Facade of the Great Rock Temple at Aboo-Simbel,'' both dating from the mid-19th century.

Watercolors that catch the eyes include the studies of ruined temples done by the Scottish painter David Roberts in the 1840's and those of a chariot and two throne chairs by Howard Carter. Seemingly, the two men were intent on understanding the civilization that, though it had influenced the Classical World, remained remote from it.